Opinion | Justin Trudeau Was His Own Worst Enemy

“There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 2015. “There are shared values — openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice. Those qualities are what make us the first post-national state.”

This vision, when he articulated it, seemed powerfully contemporary, steering Canada in the same direction as an opening, borderless world of expanding cross-cultural and economic exchange. He did not ask himself — few did — what a “post-national state” would look like, or if it would work.

The term itself sounds glamorous, a way of existing politically without the various insanities of nationalism. In practice, however, it is unclear how a post-national state could survive. Mr. Trudeau’s tenure has seen patriotism decline significantly. Only 34 percent of people in the country today say they are “very proud” to be Canadian, down from 52 percent in 2016.

The failure of Mr. Trudeau’s inclusive vision is more than a culture war question. Canada’s economic superpower has always been its widespread, cross-party support for well-regulated immigration, which has been vital to replenishing the country’s small, aging population with skilled workers. His government’s policy since Covid of bringing in half a million immigrants a year, without any firm plan on how to manage their impact on housing and infrastructure, has been a disaster; his faith in immigration as a positive force may have been too naïve to allow him to inquire about its limits. The result has been that the number of Canadians who believe there is too much immigration has increased more than 30 percentage points in the past two years alone.

At times, Mr. Trudeau seems to embody virtue signaling without effective policymaking, the worst feature of progressive politics as they have devolved over the past decade. During his time in office, land acknowledgments became common practice across Canada, while Indigenous life expectancy rates plummeted. I might add that virtue signaling is now, and has always been, a Canadian affliction, not just Mr. Trudeau’s. What Canadians have come to hate about Mr. Trudeau they have come to hate in themselves, which explains, at least in part, the intensity of the hatred.